The Three Treasures of the Humanities: discovering a way of rejuvenation.

                  In the Tao te ching, the ancient sage Lao Tzu is reported to have said that there are three treasures we should cultivate: love, contentment, and humility. Only those who love, he writes, can be courageous; only those content can be magnanimous; and only the humble have the capacity to lead others.

                  As always in the Tao te ching, Lao Tzu surprises us and confounds our expectations. He brings us to ask ourselves: what does love have to do with courage? or contentment with magnanimity? or humility with leadership? At the same time, from another part of our mind or spirit, we may sense a secret truth in these claims, one that we can appreciate less with logic perhaps than with intuition. For as he is quoted elsewhere, we must “learn to unlearn,” to upset our established convictions, in order to be “led by the Tao.”

                  If we were to value or weigh these three treasures, and draw them in a Venn diagram, it might look something like this:

Figure 1: Three Treasures of Lao Tzu

In teasing out and meditating on these treasures, we may see how love and contentment discover the means to provide supportive charity to others; or the way humility and love allow us to remonstrate, advise, and listen in the modality of care; and how contentment and humility cultivate a generosity of spirit, one open to receiving and manifesting inspiration.

                  By way of analogy, what would be the three treasures of the humanities? As Kierkegaard once suggested that humanity is a complex of mind and body enlivened by spirit, we have our foundation for our second diagram:

                                                          Figure 2: Three Treasures of the Humanities                                                         

                  The significance of the diagram, as for that we made from Lao Tzu, lies not in the separate parts but in their relationships with each other. Of course engineers, scientists, doctors, and captains of industry rely upon and sharpen their intellect through their work. But their intellect is often engaged with emotion and sense of possibility, in order to realize their dreams and visions: they are mining, in a deep if unspoken way, the treasures of the humanities.

                  The humanities offer us something fundamental and integrative. Here we may take a clue from Werner Heisenberg, one of the pioneers of quantum physics. In his student years, he discovered the importance of Plato for his understanding of atomism. As he writes in his memoirs:

                  It was then July, 1919 (a warm summer), and there were hardly any military duties, particularly in the early morning. Thus it came about frequently, shortly after sunrise, I would withdraw to the roof of the Theological Seminary and lie down there to warm myself in the sun, any old book in hand; or I would sit on the edge of the roof and watch the day beginning in the Ludwigsstrasse.

                  On one such occasion, it occurred to me take a volume of Plato on to the roof, for I wanted to read something different from the books we were supposed to study in school. With my somewhat modest Greek knowledge, I came upon the dialogue called Timaeus, where for the first time and from the original source I read something about Greek atomic philosophy. This reading made the basic thoughts of atomic theory much clearer to me than they had been…. In any case, at that time I was gaining the growing conviction that one could hardly make progress in modern atomic physics without a knowledge of Greek natural philosophy…..

                  Thus, without properly knowing how, I had become acquainted with that great thought of Greek natural philosophy which links antiquity with modern times and which only came to full fruition at the time of the Renaissance.

The Physicist’s Conception of Nature, trans. A.J. Pomerans (revised), London 1958, 60-61.

                  I have somewhat abbreviated this passage, though not by much, for it deserves to be considered as a whole, with all of Heisenberg’s qualifications as to time and place: the early morning in Munich, the roof of the Theological Seminary, the apparently serendipitous reading (in Greek!)  of a book he chanced to bring with him. And then his reflections on this moment, the meditative instant when he conceives almost paradoxically of atomic theory as an integrative idea, living across the centuries.

                  Intellect, emotion, and possibility overlap at this instant. One feels the warmth of the morning sun, hears the city’s relative stillness and early bustling, and then sees the mind’s leap to new insights, first to the perspective of Plato and then, more grandly, to the exciting coherence of ideas, traversing the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance and pausing in Germany after the Great War. Here, he tells us, the humanities fostered a renewal, not only of the sciences, but also of the creative imagination. Heisenberg weighed “that great thought of Greek natural philosophy which links antiquity to modern times.” That great thought possessed — possesses— ongoing modernity.

                  What Heisenberg the humanist and physicist tells us is that the humanities are not simply a text, an author, or field of study. Rather the humanities are a process of appreciating, imagining, and recording  the world around us, from its smallest particles to its cosmic wholeness across time and place. More than a reading, they bring together three treasures — intellect, emotion, and choice, a sense of opportunity — through which the world and our lives appear new again.  

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